


Night Shift

by inlovewithnight



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-01
Updated: 2008-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-15 15:04:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/162027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Night Shift

The coffee is burned and bitter, ugly on his tongue. He sips it anyway, slow and constant, and blinks down at the floor, willing the caffeine to keep him awake despite the fact he's tired enough that the tiles are blurring together beneath his feet. Black shoes on brown and white tile, scuffed gray, and it all looks the same through eyes that want to close.

Nurses go back and forth, nothing but shoes crossing his field of vision. His head feels like it weighs as much as his truck that's straddling two spaces out in the urgent-care lot. He can't quite convince himself to look up from the floor; too much work, and anyway, the brown-white-gray-shoes pattern is nice, soothing, steady. Not going to jump up and try to bite him, unlike a lot of other things tonight.

The doors hiss open, letting in a weak burst of morning sunlight. It's just past seven, high July, and he should've been asleep for two hours by now, off the night-shift adrenaline buzz for three. This isn't his time, these early-daylight hours. He shouldn't be here.

He brings the cup to his lips again and this time it's empty. He would drop it on the floor, but something tells him that would bring hell down on his head. The nurse at the desk, the one who looks like his Aunt Joanne, long gone now and may she rest in peace-- _she_ would give him hell for that, messing up the nice clean floor. A mop's gone by twice just in the time he's been sitting here, nursing that one cup of bad coffee. He presses the cup flat between his palms and holds it there, drawing slow breaths, watching the shadows of footsteps fall across the tiles.

Fred's voice pulls his head up, makes him look, focuses his eyes. She's walking down the hallway toward him, a nurse at her elbow. Fred's voice is high and thin and fast, an anxious stream of chatter, and she's rubbing at her arms, strokes from elbow nearly to the straps of her tank top, like she's cold. He can see the bruises on her arms, dark and fully blossomed now, every finger-mark stark and clean. If she held still, if her hands stopped fluttering, he could count them, six hands' worth, three vampires that left writing on her skin saying it had been too damn close this time.

Fred sees him and smiles a little, lifting one hand to offer an awkward wave, just folding her fingers twice in his direction. The nurse looks as well, eyes sharp and mouth disapproving, and Gunn swallows a sigh. They're twenty blocks from the Hyperion, from home, from their usual clinic that handles everything from their constant tetanus boosters to Fred's birth control pills. (They're careful, and it shouldn't-- but if two vampires can have a kid, God knows putting all their faith in latex is a damn stupid risk, and so that expense goes down as 'necessary' too, even as that list gets pared down thinner and thinner week by week by day.)

At the clinic, the tattooed guy who works the front desk calls Gunn _Chuck_ and Fred _my future wife_. The staff asks where Miss Cordelia is, and how that baby's doing these days. ( _Scarier than you think_ , Fred and Gunn never tell them.) Here, though, they're among the daylight people, and it's all wrong. The things they do and say, their silences, their bodies, are all speaking a different code, all mean something else. Fred's bruises and Gunn's torn sweatshirt, the tired fog in their eyes and the way they wince against the light, it all turns ugly when brought into the day.

They're only heroes in the dark.

The nurse disappears down another hall, and Fred sinks into the chair next to him, slipping both of her arms around one of his and resting her forehead on his shoulder. "No concussion," she says. "I told you."

He finds one of her hands and laces their fingers together tightly. "Better safe than sorry."

She doesn't lift her head, and he can feel her breath, feel her breathing him in. "Let's go home."

He searches for his keys with his free hand, not willing to let go of her yet, not wanting to move away. "You hungry?"

"Yeah, but I'm more tired." She sighs, a shaky sound, and he squeezes her hand tighter. "Maybe we can take tonight off. Unless we get a miraculous lead today? Just...take the night off."

"Yeah." He rubs his thumb across the back of her hand, over the map of veins beneath her skin. "We could eat dinner in bed. Watch a movie."

"Maybe go really crazy and have a whole beer." She sits up slowly, smiling at him again even as she winces. The shadows under her eyes are dark enough to look like another set of bruises, but her smile is purely Fred, bright but making him think of dark, of running on rooftops until dawn. "Each."

They hold hands in the truck, while she stabs restlessly at the radio scanner, dodging the morning talk shows for music. Any kind, any flavor, anything but harsh and choppy day-world words, talking about politics and sports and pop culture that doesn't mean much to them anymore. They used to be pretty good at keeping one eye on all that while still doing their work in the nighttime, but it's all kind of slipping away now, and he doesn't have the energy to miss it, or do more than watch it go.

At the hotel, Connor is asleep on the couch in the lobby, curled up in a ball like a puppy, some kind of crazy wild puppy with rabies and jagged teeth. Fred moves to wake him and Gunn catches her around the waist. (Not by the wrist, not the arm, not too close to the bruises; no more hurting tonight, God, no more.)

"You know he woke up as soon as we stepped in the courtyard," he reminds her, murmuring against her hair. "He's happy there. C'mon, let's get you into bed."

"Ooh, baby," she says with a little laugh, but they're both so tired the stairs almost defeat them, and they crawl into bed without taking off their shoes.

She curls up against him and he wraps himself around her, a shield, something safe. Heavy curtains block out the sun and hold in what cool air they coax out of the whining box fan in the corner, draped in wet towels when they feel optimistic and left bare when they give up. The room smells of stale sweat, staler coffee, and a fading hint of chemical lilacs from the last time they did laundry, probably a little too long ago.

This is home. Dim and quiet and theirs, wrong in the daylight and right in the dark.

She finds his hands on her waist and covers them with her own. "G'night, Charles," she says, then laughs a little. "Good morning. Whatever."

"Sweet dreams." He kisses the curve of her neck, and she breathes out slowly as he breathes in.  



End file.
